Verenigde Staten

In the aftermath of the American avant-garde period, media artist Barbara Hammer, armed with two samurai swords, traverses her own body and reborn sexuality. To the rhythm of diary excerpts read aloud and aggressive string music, she chains herself up, buries her head in the sand, and masturbates among her houseplants, while the neighbourhood children watch from outside.

The United States of America is a road movie in the purest sense. To the rhythm of Benning and Gordon’s silent journey through New York, Chicago, the Rocky Mountains, Las Vegas, and other locations, they show a North America that looks much more sober than the bombastic image we are used to seeing of the country. Their USA feels calmer, almost anti-American. 

Stan Brakhage’s films seek to encourage viewers to ignore traditional narrative structure in favour of pure visual perception and a visceral experience. Strongly inspired by the paintings of Gunter Forg, the hand-painted work Dark Night of The Soul depicts a dark brown wall, littered with yellowed images of other interiors, next to multicoloured holes that offer a glimpse of the outside world behind the shifting facade. 

Francis Thompson spent eight years working on N.Y., N.Y., perhaps his most famous film. It is a collection of images of New York City that he captured using special lenses, prisms, and mirrors. N.Y., N.Y. thus becomes a hall of mirrors with a cubist-Dadaist feel that offers a new perspective on the cityscape. The film was awarded the Golden Palm for best short film. 

Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid took inspiration from surrealist films like Un chien andalou and L'Age d'Or by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel for their own avant-garde short film—even though they repeatedly denied it themselves. Following a similar dream logic, Meshes of the Afternoon tells a circular story about a dreaming woman.

Yes, Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett also made a film once, archetypically titled Film. A man tries to escape the gaze of an all-seeing eye, inspired by Berkeley’s statement, “Esse est percipi”: to be is to be perceived. The disorienting camera work comes from Oscar winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflective masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera (with the latter in the title role).

Poet and filmmaker James Broughton was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a precursor to the famous Beat Generation.  His work focuses on bodies and sexuality. In the tongue-in-cheek Adventures of Jimmy, he plays a lost man in search of “playmates,” eventually entering a monogamous relationship. The irony lies in the contrast between word and image.

During World War II, many American cartoons made fun of some of its pivotal figures. Norm McCabe’s satirical The Ducktators doesn’t mince words either: eight minutes of unrelenting slapstick comedy, insults and criticisms directed at Hitler, Mussolini, Hideki Tojo-respecifically a chick, a goose with an Italian accent, and a Japanese duck.

Lynne Sachs is een Amerikaanse experimentele kunstenaar en dichter. Haar documentaires en essayistische films vertrekken steeds vanuit een feministisch perspectief, waarin ze sociale kritiek verweeft met een persoonlijke subjectiviteit. In Same Stream Twice filmt ze haar dochter twee keer, op zes- en op zestienjarige leeftijd, terwijl die rondjes rond haar moeder, de filmmaker, loopt.

Bill Plympton is a household name amongst animation filmmakers and illustrators. His illustrations have been published in The New York Times and magazines such as Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Your Face prompted his career in the heyday of MTV.

Experimental filmmaker Marie Menken was noted for her unique way of filmmaking which incorporated collage techniques. Menken was one of the first New York filmmakers to use a hand-hend camera and trained Any Warhol on it use. “Marie’s films were her flower garden. Whenever she was in her garden, she opened her soul, with all her secret wishes and dreams,” according to Jonas Mekas. 

Passersby on Astor Place in New York City speak a silent language as they walk past the reflective surface of a storefront window. Heller wanted to capture the “unwritten choreography of the street,” the dance of glances.

This experimental music video by Marlon Riggs politicises the homoeroticism of African-American men. With sensual and provocative images, Anthem reaffirms the “self-evident right” to life and liberty in an era of pervasive anti-gay and anti-Black backlash and hysterical cultural oppression.

Lois Weber was the very first female to shoot a feature film and build a rich Hollywood oeuvre that is often compared to that of D.W. Griffith in quality and quantity. A woman of many talents, she began her career in music and theater. Her revolutionary use of split screen, which she pioneered, made her work iconic.

Suzan Pitt, first a painter and fashion designer, later became an icon within the animation world. Her surreal sensations create worlds where nothing is what it seems. The physical rawness, sharp sense of humour, and kaleidoscopic use of colour define a body of work full of new forms.

Marlon Riggs eagerly used then-new video technology, combining poetry, music, performance, and documentary to address racist stereotypes. Affirmations is a humorous confession about the desires and dreams of Black gay men, at once tender and political.

Pull My Daisy is a high point in improvisational cinema and a signature film for the Beat Generation. Spontaneity was one of the Beat authors’ formal traits, and this film, too, involved a great deal of improvisation. Pull My Daisy is a high point in improvisational cinema and a signature film for the Beat Generation.

American documentary filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt is known for his collage films, which often explore the personable and psychological cores of being human. In his most recent film, he questions the relationship between a father and his daughter through home movies.

Writer and poet Abigail Child has been a lynchpin of American experimental cinema since the 1980s. A recognised pioneer in editing, she focuses on the interplay between sound and image to create, in the words of L.A. Weekly, “brilliantly exciting work”, with a keen attention to form that helps examine established norms around narration and gender.

Artist Rose Lowder makes all her films with a 16mm Bolex that allows her to film frame by frame. She skips and emulsifies some frames and leaves others blank, then uses the same camera to rewind and film these frames. With this method, she creates a new viewing experience in which two different situations are viewed simultaneously.

The silent black-and-white film The Private Life of a Cat is an intimate study of a cat who gives birth to a litter of kittens and cares for them as they grow up. It is filmed entirely from the cat’s eye-level.

Robert Fenz worked as a cameraman with Chantal Akerman and was one of the most committed filmmakers reviving avant-garde traditions for a long time until he passed away in 2020 at the age of 52. His films, mostly made on black-and-white 16mm, possess a rare energy and restless beauty.

Artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowciz focuses on civil rights and gay identity within American popular culture. A few years before he died of HIV, he made Beautiful People.

In an exercise of ironic self-awareness, Chantal Akerman tries to deal with her own procrastination by making a film about laziness itself. The film is part of a collective project in which seven women each are making a short film about one of the deadly sins.

We can never get enough of Buster Keaton, The Great Stone Face of the 1920s. One Week is the first independent film he released himself, full of new stunts in and around houses and on ladders.

De binnenplaatsen van Łódź, een alomtegenwoordig architectonisch element van de stad, zijn de kinderspeelplaatsen van de omliggende flatgebouwen. Podwórka is zowel een studie van een specifieke plaats als een evocatie van de vindingrijkheid van de kindertijd.

Now Pretend is an experimental investigation into using race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing on language, personal memories, and the 1959 text “Black Like Me”, it deals with Lacan’s mirror stage, and the movement from object to subject. 

Su Friedrich, a pioneer in American avant-garde cinema, writes, directs, and edits all her films. These are often a mix of the personal and political, ranging from home movies to video interviews and more classic narratives.    

Barbara Hammer is a pioneer in lesbian cinema. In her over fifty-year career, she has made both classic and more experimental films in which gender roles and female relationships are central.

During his heyday, Buster Keaton was known as The Great Stone Face: the American comedian is best known for silent films focusing on physical comedy and his dry facial expressions.

American underground artist George Kuchar is known for his low-fi aesthetic. He has directed over two hundred films and videos. Hold Me While I'm Naked reached 52nd place in The Village Voice’s Critic's Poll in 2000.

Scorpio Rising is perhaps Kenneth Anger's best-known work. Set to the beats of 1960s pop music, the film follows a group of bikers and explores the occult, homosexuality, and Nazism. It also idolises rebellious public figures such as James Dean and Marlon Brando.

American filmmaker Robert Breer first experimented with rotoscoping in Gulls and Buoys, although by 1972, the technique was already considered outdated. The film is reminiscent of an abstract holiday video on the beach.

The mystery of the filmmaking process is a crucial element in Robert Beavers' artistic signature. Winged Dialogue is characteristic of many of his films: at once lyrical and rigorous, sensual and complex. Mediterranean cities, landscapes, and cultural traditions unveil deeper personal and aesthetic themes. The sexuality of the body and the purity of the soul come together glowingly.

Using a typical American family car, avant-garde queer filmmaker Su Friedrich tells the story of a love affair and its demise. Here, the old, beige station wagon with faux wood panelling is the vehicle of an atypical lesbian couple. When their relationship ends, the vehicle becomes the property of one of them and curses the existence of the other.

A documentary film about AIDS and one unconventional woman’s efforts to educate her small, Southern community. DiAna DiAna is a local hairdresser who transformed her beauty parlor into a center for AIDS and safe sex information.

A classic from the oeuvre of one of the comic pioneers of silent cinema.

A devastating portrait of the artist's niece, haunted by the abuse she suffered as a child and the passivity of the family members who allowed it to continue.

A Hollywood villa on a sultry summer night. The escort does what he was hired to do and gives his client the illusion he has paid for. “I’ll make you a star”, the customer says, before the tide turns abruptly and the power dynamics are unsettled.

A young man approaches some sailors, who eventually turn on him, strip him naked and beat him to death. Subsequently, fireworks explode.

A collage about mortality by Stan Brakhage, one of the most prominent figures of experimental film of the 20th century.